Just past week we got the news of three senior employees leaving Poland-based studio People Can Fly, co-developers for the upcoming XBOX 360 title Gears Of War: Judgment, Epic Games has apparently purchased the rest of the development studio.
While Epic Games, owner of the Gears Of War series and Unreal Engine, had a majority of stake on the studio since 2007, now proceeds to fully own the Poland-based People Can Fly.
According to Mark Rein, VP of Epic Games: “One of the things that got missed with that story was that we bought the rest of People Can Fly that we didn’t own. We didn’t announce that, so that was also part of it.” he stated at Game Developers Conference being held in Europe.
“But now we own it all. We had a controlling stake, but the owner still owned a fairly large piece of it.” he said. The “owners” he mentioned refers to the people who left the development team last week to do something different despite being in the middle of the development of Judgment. ”They left, they’re gonna do their own thing. They have something cool they’re gonna do, and we’ll be very supportive of it.” Rein said.
It’s uncertain at this point that how much Epic Games paid for the acquisition of People Can Fly. With this latest acquisition, Epic Games now wholly owns five subsidiaries: Chair, Impossible Games, People Can Fly, Epic Japan and Epic Korea.
Some are speculating that the real reason behind the departure of the three senior employees; Adrian Chmielarz, Andrzej Poznanski and Michal Kosieradzki, was the acquisition of People Can Fly by Epic.
Despite the departures, including the departure of Epic Games, now former, director of production, Rod Fergusson, Rein assures that it won’t have any negative impact on the development of Judgment.